The Feynman Technique is one of the most effective ways to learn really difficult subjects and complex skills. Russell Newton breaks down practical steps and real-world examples from his professional studies, showing why this method helps you understand deeply and study efficiently. Learn how to tackle complex material, master challenging topics, and break down difficult concepts into simple explanations today.

⏱ CHAPTERS
0:00 Intro
1:12 Sign That Something Is True
3:35 Building Knowledge Foundation
5:49 Impact of Experience on Brain Structure
7:31 Importance of Opening Up to Feedback
11:01 Common Misunderstanding in Learning Processes
12:49 Discipline and Success Connection

If you’re looking to boost your personal development and learn complex skills faster with critical thinking, then you’re in the right place! At NewtonMG, host Russell Newton shares simple yet powerful learning strategies like the Feynman Technique to help you understand deeply and rewire your brain for better comprehension of even the most difficult subjects. Join us to unlock your full potential and start mastering any topic at lightning speed.

Every one of us has had a need to learn a topic that felt too big to even start on.
A section from a book, a specific skill for a new hobby, maybe a certification at work.
Something where once you open it up, it feels both bottomless and overwhelming.
That initial excitement that quickly turns to uncertainty, doubt, maybe even fear.
Have you hit one of those?
And have you just given up because of the magnitude of the topic?
Pretty sure we all have.
The reason we abandon trying to learn this new thing, like second language, is both obvious and helpful, because it points us right to its own fix.
In my own studies, work, and professional careers, this reason shows up independently in easily half a dozen different places.
a critical thinking guide, a neuroscience book, a psychology journal a century old, and in interviews with two people who’ve probably never read any of those same sources but still landed on the exact same idea from their own experience.
And that’s usually a good sign that something is actually true.
Author Stephen Schuster’s book, The Critical Thinker, is our starting point today.
And from that, you can see the direction our fix is going to take.
Now, a quick side note here.
Have you seen that Natasha Leguero video about critical thinking?
She talks about it like it’s a planking, or one of those other things people used to do in their embarrassing youth, like a weird old fad that nobody does anymore.
if you haven’t seen it, search YouTube for bring back critical thinking.
And that’s what we’re doing here today.
But now back to today’s obstacle, a topic that seems too complex to make complete sense of.
Let’s take as a working example, blood flow in the human body.
We all know the basics, but do we really know the process?
Now let’s look back to René Descartes.
He explicitly lays out a four-step method for learning, and rule number two from Descartes says, divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible and as might be necessary for its adequate solution.
A little old English there, maybe.
Hopefully it’s not too confusing.
Stephen Schuster simplifies a little bit.
He tells us to think of a complex topic like a swimming pool.
If you jump straight into the deep end and it’s overwhelming, that’s why most people quit before they even really start.
Instead, do the obvious.
Start on the steps at the shallow end.
Take the topic and pull out its two or three core ideas.
Not every detail about it, just a handful of concepts.
Everything else is actually built on.
Lay those out as a map, one branch per idea.
Then, this is the step most of us are going to skip.
Explain each branch back to yourself out loud, I dare you, in your own words.
Don’t just read it, explain it.
So back to our example, blood flow.
We know there’s four branches.
The heart is the pump, arteries carrying the blood out, capillaries where the actual exchange happens, and veins that bring it back.
Now, map those four.
Now, explain each one to yourself.
And for most people, the branch that goes shaky is why capillaries specifically.
Why does the exchange have to happen at the smallest vessels in the worlds?
And that is the branch you should flag.
You go read specifically about capillary walls, not the whole circulatory system, and then fold it back in.
Now wherever you get stuck, wherever that explanation goes shaky, that’s not a failure.
That’s the map telling you exactly where to put your attention next.
Do a little targeted research on just that one gap.
Nothing else.
Then fold what you learn back in.
Now, once the whole thing holds together, run one more test, describe it to somebody else, and see what survives their questions.
Now, this reminds me of what we call the Feynman principle, whether it’s an actual Feynman quote or not, is maybe open to debate.
He said, reportedly, if you can’t explain it to a child, you don’t really understand it.
And that’s the entire method.
It works precisely because you’re never trying to hold the whole subject in your head at once.
You’re only ever holding one branch.
Now here’s why that matters, beyond just remembering more.
Researchers at the University College London scan the brains of London’s taxi drivers and bus drivers.
bus drivers run a couple of fixed routes, same turns every day.
And once that gets memorized, there’s nothing left to think about.
It’s autopilot.
But taxi drivers?
They can’t do that.
Every fare is a different starting point and a different destination.
So they have to hold something closer to the real map of the whole city and constantly reevaluate it, reroute around a closure,
question where the route they’d normally take is actually still the right one today.
The taxi driver’s hippocampi, the brain region tied to spatial memory, were measurably larger.
That’s not really a story about memory.
It’s a story about which one of these two jobs requires you to keep questioning your own default and which one lets you stop thinking entirely.
A shallow, single path understanding of anything works exactly like the bus route.
It’s fine until something changes and then it just breaks because there was never any real evaluation happening beneath it.
A layered, connected understanding is what lets you actually interrogate a situation when it shifts instead of just running the route you memorized and hoping it still applies.
Another book we’re going to reference today is from Albert Rutherford.
He actually maps critical thinking itself as a pyramid and it starts somewhere you wouldn’t expect.
Confidence, not overconfidence, just enough nerve to sit with a hard question instead of avoiding it because most people’s real block is an ability.
It’s the fear of being wrong out loud.
Clear that?
And the actual thinking starts
Is this source reliable?
Does it hold up against what you already know?
Does anything else out there confirm it or contradict it?
And here’s the part that separates real critical thinking from just collecting more information.
You have to be willing to let in whatever doesn’t fit your existing view, not just whatever agrees with it.
You have to get out of the echo chamber.
And that’s the whole discipline really in one sentence.
Now somebody who’s never read Rutherford’s book most likely landed on the exact same thing the hard way by learning guitar.
When I started to play guitar.
I, the people I looked up to and the people I wanted to kind of imitate were the best in the world.
And I was like, that’s where I want to go.
And I had, there’s, I think there’s this, I don’t know the actual name of it, but I think it’s like, it’s self-awareness, but it’s self-awareness of your ability to measure your own level in a certain skill set, like to understand that are you good or not, or how good are you.
That’s a very, not everyone has it, but it’s a very important one and you develop that by opening yourself up.
See, if you’re not sheltered, if you read a lot, if you explore a lot, if you learn a lot, all of that.
Now that kind of an accurate self-read doesn’t happen in a vacuum though.
It only comes from actually exposing yourself to feedback that could prove you wrong.
Here’s what that costs him in practice.
Feedback that is true feedback hurts.
The person that I love the most, my wife, she has the harshest feedback for me.
It’s so hard to do anything.
I can count on my hand the times in my life that she said, you’ve done something good.
All the time, whenever I show her an article or I play something, it’s like, you could have done this.
I remember even writing poetry for her.
This is like iconic.
I have, I still have, I wrote poetry for her in my, and she sent it back with corrections, grammar corrections on my freaking poetry.
Like I’m writing poetry for the woman I love more than life itself.
And she sent it back with corrections to the grammar.
At the bottom, it’s just because you can.
It doesn’t mean you should.
Exactly.
It should be.
But I can tell you that that woman has made me the best person I can be.
Because if it wasn’t for that, at first, I’m angry.
And I’m trying to convince her.
And then when I just let go, because I’m human at the end of the day, that’s why I say, I don’t care how much enlightened or informed you are.
Real feedback hurts.
So it hurts me because I’m presenting something to her and I’m trying to negotiate with her like, no, I wrote it this way or I did that and she doesn’t budge, which is why she’s awesome.
And then I have to relent and come back and say, well, let me see if she’s right.
And I write a better thing.
I write a better article.
I do better work.
She’s also my partner in business in my last five ventures because she’s the person that holds me accountable the most.
But in life, we don’t seek those people.
We seek people who are pleased by us.
It’s just a natural thing.
And if you really want a life that is better, seek people that are so honest with you and so truthful that they are a mirror to you, because that’s what will cause you to develop.
But we don’t do that as human beings.
We like to feel comfortable.
We like to surround ourselves in our bubble.
We don’t seek opinions that disagree with us.
Now that’s not just self-awareness for its own sake either.
It’s a habit you can actually train.
Turn the same scrutiny you applied to someone else’s argument back on your own conclusions.
There’s a review from a century ago, buried in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, that makes basically the same argument with almost surgical precision.
The reviewer describes a method for diagnosing struggling learners by breaking the mind down into specific processes, attention, memory, association, abstraction, and the entire method is just this, figure out which one process is actually weak and drill that, not all the processes.
Most people, when they realize they don’t understand something, respond by rereading the whole thing front to back again.
That’s not thinking critically about your own confusion.
That’s just repeating the same input and hoping it lands differently this time.
Actually diagnosing precisely where your understanding breaks down instead of vaguely gesturing at the whole topic is the critical thinking move.
It’s the exact same instinct Schuster’s exercise is asking you for when it tells you to flag the one shaky branch and go research just that, not the whole map again.
Now, we’re going to find this same discipline showing up somewhere else you might not expect.
Not a psychology book, a business conversation, and it’s making a genuinely critical thinking point, not just a motivational one.
Success doesn’t actually tell you anything new about your own reasoning, because you already knew how to do the thing.
Failure is the only place new information about yourself actually shows up.
which by the way, failing at something is most likely the best education in the world.
If you did something successful, you probably already knew how to do it.
You didn’t learn anything.
If you failed, you absolutely learned something.
What’d you learn?
All right, don’t freak out.
Recognize you’re a human.
We all fail.
What do you need to do differently?
So it’s all rooted in that belief of like,
Every opportunity is an opportunity to grow.
And then also realizing, like, we are all flawed.
It’s not like everything I say or everything I do works here.
Actually, most of it doesn’t work.
But we all know that that’s part of the process of getting to where we want to get to, right?
Now, I enjoyed that interview.
And what we hear there is not just a pep talk.
It’s a method.
It’s the same one burger and starbird layout in the five elements of effective thinking.
Don’t just feel bad about a mistake and move on.
Interrogate it with three specific questions.
What actually went wrong?
What does that tell you?
And what will you do differently the next time?
Now those same three questions arrived at independently by a business owner instead of a mathematician.
When two people with nothing in common land on the exact same method, that’s another sign that it’s actually true and not just some academic mumbo-jumbo.
Now every step that we’ve covered so far assumes you’re actually willing to be wrong.
There’s a version of confidence that quietly kills that willingness without you noticing, and it’s worth being able to spot it in yourself.
None of this.
The map, the pyramid, the diagnosis, the feedback is a one-time fix.
It only keeps working if you never stop treating your own understanding as provisional.
We mentioned earlier the physicist Richard Feynman.
He has spent a good part of his career obsessed with exactly this problem.
As he put it directly, you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
Everything in this video is really just different people across a hundred years and completely different fields independently finding their own way to make that a little less true.